UC Berkeley Web Feature

(L-r)
Anna Badkhen, San Francisco
Chronicle; Jackie Spinner,
Washington Post; Orville Schell, dean
of the Graduate School of Journalism; John
Burns, New York Times; and Mark
Danner, UC Berkeley journalism professor and
contributor to The
New York Review of Books.(Photos
by BAP)

Top Iraq war correspondents discuss
risking their lives to tell a truth that few want
to hear — or believe

BERKELEY – "I
have lost all faith in the media," says
the National Guardsman narrating "The War
Tapes," the
first war documentary to be filmed entirely by soldiers.
A portion of the as-yet-unreleased film about the
Iraq war was screened for a UC Berkeley audience
last night (March 13) as part of a forum titled "Iraq:
Reports from the Frontlines," introduced by
San Francisco Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein. That
soldier's sentiment was the backdrop for the discussion
that followed among fiveinfluential
journalists who have reported extensively on the
Iraq war — and judging by occasional bitterness-tinged
heckling, more than a few audience members shared
the soldier's viewpoint.

Iraq behind the headlines
Journalism dean Orville Schell's gripping
piece
"Baghdad: The Besieged Press," slated
to appear April 6 in the New York Review of
Books, is available now from Salon.com and TomDispatch.com.
In it, Schell visits U.S. reporters holed
up in fortified compounds and increasingly
cut off from the hideous reality just outside
in Baghdad.

The discussion centered on two deeply polarizing
questions. Given the extreme danger of the situation
in Iraq, are journalists in Iraq even able to cover
the real story? And are they getting the story "right"?
Responding to moderator Orville Schell, dean of Berkeley's
Graduate School of Journalism and just back from
a trip to Iraq, the four participants offered rather
different perspectives on both questions. Meanwhile,
two reporters who were not present cast long shadows
over the journalistic exchange: the constant deadly
threat faced by reporters was symbolized by Jill
Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor freelancer
kidnapped in Baghdad in January and still missing,
while the damage to journalistic reputations and
credibility was embodied by controversial former
New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

Straight from the fog of
war

The segment of "The War Tapes" proved
the perfect introduction to the evening's topic.
According to forum participant John Burns, the New
York Times' Baghdad bureau chief and two-time Pulitzer
Prize winner, this is "the single best
document you could see. It captures, in ways we as
embedded reporters could not, the misery and futility
of this war."

Directed by Deborah Scranton via Internet uploads
and instant-messaging, the film will be released
to theaters in July; its producers are those behind "The
Fog of War," the Errol Morris documentary about
Robert McNamara. To create the film, five soldiers
volunteered to bring small digital cameras with them
on deployment, often mounting the cameras inside
their HumVees and on tanks as they patrolled. (One
of them was New Hampshire National Guard Sergeant
Steve Pink, who joined Scranton to address last night's
audience briefly.) The edited result of more than
100 hours of footage is a never-before-seen account
of war from the warriors' perspective: at times terrifying,
ribald, tedious, and heart-wrenching.

Training in cold New Hampshire before being deployed,
troops in camouflage uniforms make angels in the
snow as the cameraman giggles and jokes that of course "we're
ready for the desert." Later, when mortars land
at Baghdad's Camp Anaconda a little too close for
comfort, both the camera and the soldier-narrator's
voice shake from adrenaline as he tells how Anaconda
is the most heavily attacked base in Iraq. An Iraqi
selling a pornographic pin-up of a woman is asked
if he has any "with farm animals." A Lebanese-born,
Arabic-speaking National Guardsman, one of the cameramen, chats
easily with the young boys who gather around the
soldiers whenever they are out of their vehicles.
The interview of that soldier's mother at home in
the United States, and her tearful incomprehension
of how she could have gotten her son out of a civil
war zone to emigrate, only to have him volunteer
to go fight in another such war, is one of the segment's
most memorable.

The film's footage of the immediate aftermath of
a car bomb near a checkpoint is visceral. Such bombs
are a daily hazard in Iraq and dutifully noted in
U.S. newspapers, but few Americans have seen the
gruesome reality as revealed in "War Tapes." The
camera pans slowly over the blackened shell of the
vehicle and the charred upper torso of a man, head
burned beyond recognition, lying halfway outside
the open car door in a pool of blood. In numb tones,
the soldier holding the camera tells us what that
blood and flesh smells like and describes how crisped
skin fragments are crunching under his feet.

A ticket to the adrenaline
roller coaster

Watching the film gave the Berkeley audience the
tiniest taste of what it feels like to be in Iraq
right now: hearts taking off like jackrabbits when
artillery fire suddenly pings the windshield right
in front of you, stomachs turning at the sight of
the remnants of violent death. And yet, "when
you travel with the U.S. military you only get one
part of the story," reminded participant Anna
Badkhen, a Chronicle staff writer who has reported
from wartime Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and
Iraq. "You can't say on a raid, 'Excuse me,
I'm just going to talk to this person, can you wait
10 minutes' … We never find out what the Iraqis
are feeling."

'The American public, it
seemed, had no idea why I was in Iraq. It
is not that I wanted their praise.…I
don't run from controversial stories just
because bloggers or anyone else might take
a crack at me. After all, the very principle
of free speech that sent me to Iraq gives
people the right to criticize what I write.
I'm fair game.'

-Jackie Spinner,
writing in her memoir about Iraq, "Tell Them
I Didn't Cry"

Jackie Spinner, Washington Post staff writer and
author of "Tell Them I Didn't Cry," an
account of a year spent in Baghdad starting in May
2004, disagreed that reporters in Iraq are prevented
from telling both sides. "I think we're getting
90 percent of the story," she said. When disbelieving
guffaws rang out from the audience, she retorted, "Excuse
me, have you been there?" She went on to explain
how when Washington Post reporters can't go out, "we
rely on this whole cadre of Iraqi stringers and translators,
who in the case of the Washington Post are Post-trained
journalists."

Those skeptical of this reliance should take the
time to read Spinner's book, which describes in detail
the tight bond between the Post's Baghdad correspondents
and the Iraqis who risk their lives to work for the
bureau, often keeping their jobs a secret even from
family members lest the insurgents kill them in retaliation.
Before the situation in Iraq turned even more dangerous,
Spinner — a UC Berkeley journalism alumna — would
dress in a headscarf and full-length abaya and
ride to the scene of an incident. There she would
wait while her translator brought her an Iraqi who
she could interview inside the tinted windows of
the car. Later, she could not always go herself,
but would be in constant contact with the Iraqi staff,
guiding what questions they asked and pressing for
details of the source's mannerisms, hesitations,
and context.

And yet, "it's never quite the same as going
yourself," admitted Burns. He invoked the Carroll
kidnapping and reminded the audience that almost
70 journalists, the majority of them Iraqi,
have already been killed in these three years of
the Iraq war — roughly
the same number as died during the decade-plus duration
of the Vietnam War. (Three Iraqi journalists were
shot dead just in the past seven
days.) Explaining the bind he is in as
bureau chief, deciding whether getting a particular
story is worth the risk to his staff, he asked, "Am
I going to commit my colleagues or myself into a
situation which can very easily turn catastrophic
for us? My pledge to my editors is that everyone
who goes comes home safe, although it's more a prayer
than an expectation at this point."

Mark Danner, a professor at UC Berkeley's Graduate
School of Journalism, was the most pessimistic of
the group, although he tried to couch his disagreement
respectfully. "I think it's important to distinguish
between good journalism, which is being done there,
and conditions that are overwhelmingly difficult," said
Danner, who has made three trips to Iraq and is the
author of 2004's "Torture and Truth: America,
Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror" and "The
Iraq War: The Secret Way to War," forthcoming
this year.

"The story we're getting is very limited because
the risks are so great," Danner concluded. "[The
violence] has to have an effect, it has had
an effect, and I think we should recognize that."

When no news is good-enough news

Whether journalists are getting even that limited
story right depends on what "right" means
to the reader. Most soldiers, including those who
made "The War Tapes," and conservatives
believe that the media focuses on the war's negative
aspects, to the exclusion of all the good works being
done in Iraq. When Schell, Burns, and Spinner were
interviewed on KQED's Forum program the morning of
the Berkeley talk, one caller to the program excoriated
the media for failing to report sooner on the torture
and degradation by U.S. soldiers of prisoners at
Abu Ghraib, which he claimed were known about for
a year beforehand.

Spinner defended her coverage, even in the face
of e-mails like one she recalled receiving that told
her she should have died that day in Fallujah, instead
of the marine whose death she reported. "The Iraq war has
so polarized this country. That's why you hear hisses
and boos and claps, depending on what you're saying — people
want to hear journalists reaffirm their previously
held beliefs about the war," Spinner said. "And
I don't do that. I simply speak what I see. And I'm
sorry if that's offensive to people, but I'm a journalist."

Not just a journalist but an "old-school journalist,"
she clarified in response to Schell's
first question about the evolutions of the panelists'
views of the war. "I
went to Iraq not because I was for or against it,
but because there was a
war," Spinner said, adding she believes it is
inappropriate for journalists to take sides publicly,
as they are supposed to write from a neutral stance.

'We've been fairly
inventive in ways of getting around the security
situation. We do go out. This is not hotel
journalism.…All of the elements that
are crucial to the American public to reach
its decisions about this war, are accessible
in the coverage that they are getting from
the principal newspapers and television networks.
Would we like to do more? Yes we would.'

-John Burns,
Baghdad bureau chief
for
the New York Times

The others were not so circumspect. "I've
covered so many conflicts, and seen so many unnecessary
deaths, and I thought this war could have been avoided," Badkhen
answered Schell. Danner's quip that "I thought
it was a terrible idea at the beginning, and then
I really turned
against it," got a big laugh and a round of
applause, but he had the home-team advantage: many
in the audience had likely attended his pre-invasion
debate in January 2003 with hawkish journalist Christopher
Hitchens over whether war with Iraq would make America
safer.

Meanwhile Burns, who began reporting from Iraq long
before the U.S.-led invasion, said that he had at
first believed that Iraqis would be better off if
the violent tyrant Saddam Hussein were toppled. He
had been "mesmerized by Saddam Hussein's brutality
into looking through a narrow glass," he admitted,
and had "missed the fractured society beneath
the tyranny," a society that is now looking
as if it is about to degenerate into a bloody, decades-long,
unresolvable civil war.

One would think that when Burns — with his
40-year career of reporting on wars — says
somberly that this war does not look as if it's
going to turn out well for either Iraq or America,
that would be a somewhat persuasive message across
political-party lines. And yet he too hears constantly
that the New York Times is not reporting the "good
news" coming
out of Iraq. In that morning's KQED interview, he
asked rhetorically whether Americans would prefer
a "good-news newspaper," like the Soviet
Union's Pravda was, before explaining that journalism's
nature "inclines us somewhat more to look at
things that go wrong than things that go right."

The torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by
U.S. soldiers was unarguably the biggest single story
of the war today, Burns said, calling it "an
arrow in the back of every American soldier who goes
to Iraq." And yet the Abu Ghraib incidents
are not representative of what the U.S. armed forces
in Iraq do — building schools, repairing sewage
lines, helping Iraqi victims of suicide bombings — and
Americans have every reason to be deeply proud of
their armed forces in Iraq, he emphasized. "Is
that adequately reflected in what we write? I'm afraid
to say it isn't…if 52 people get killed in
a succession of bombings as they were yesterday in
Sadr City in Baghdad, that's a major story. You can't
ignore it. We have to dedicate resources to it," Burns
explained. "Now, whilst that was going
on I have no doubt that there were thousands of American
troops doing things of direct and immediate benefit
to the Iraqi people."

Weapons of mass distraction

Schell asked Burns if he thought whether the reporting
done by fellow New York Times' reporter Judy Miller
on Saddam's presumed weapons of mass destruction — reporting
that was later shown to be based on manufactured
and erroneous intelligence from sources with motives
of their own — had overly greased America's
path to war. Burns replied at length how Miller was
not alone in being duped, that he too could not forgive
himself for having failed "to follow through
on my own precepts. I thought this man was … a
trickster of the highest order," he said. "Why
did it never cross my mind that he didn't have them
but wanted us to believe that he did?"

Danner swooped in to suggest that the nonexistence
of those WMDs had muddied the waters and caused people
to forget the original argument, which was still
worth debating: "The real question was whether
[Saddam's] possession of those weapons justified
the war to remove the regime," he argued, adding
his contention, which he has held since before the
invasion, that American security would almost certainly
be degraded by a preemptive war. The WMDs "were
in essence a pretext, a symbol," he said. "The
war was not under debate" — only the reason
for it was.

According to Danner, a government that wants to
make a case for war based on classified intelligence is
in a very powerful position, "because it can
dole out those bits of information to a scoop-hungry
press like little sweetmeats," Danner said,
gesturing as if teasing a dog at a dinner table. "That's
essentially what Judy Miller was made into, a kind
of seal who jumped up for these tidbits." After
the laughter subsided, Danner acknowledged that other
journalists fell into the same subservient trap as
Miller, and that she was simply the highest-profile
seal.

Anger management

Schell's last question to the assembled journalists
was which story from Iraq they would most like to
cover if security were not an issue. Spinner quickly
said that in an ideal world, she would like to get
at the heart of the insurgency, that she cannot understand
why the foreign fighters who come to Iraq are tolerated
by the Iraqis. Nor can the Iraqis she interviews
understand why the world's strongest military power
has not yet vanquished the insurgents.

"That is the story," agreed Burns. "Three
years into this war and we still don't know who the
insurgents are or how they are structured."

Danner detoured back to answer a previous question
of Schell's: whether the anger
felt toward the media by the U.S. public — including
some in the Berkeley audience — was displaced
anger that "really wants to be directed at the
government, but since the government isn't listening,
it gets directed at journalists?"

Journalists, Danner argued, have indeed been getting
enough of the story both in Iraq and in Washington,
DC, and getting it right. "The conceptual problem
has to do with information versus politics," he
said.

His argument, essentially, was that the Bush Administration
has hijacked reality, and that a confused and angry
public has turned to shooting the messenger. Although
almost as soon as the invasion commenced, journalists
were reporting accurately that the military did not
have enough troops to secure the cities — a
fact later admitted by figures as high up as Paul
Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority in Iraq — "the problem is that
no consequences have flowed from that. No one's been
fired, no more troops have been sent.…And
that's true of torture, of a lot of other policy
failures of this administration," said Danner. "We
know about them, yet we keep looking to the press
to say, 'You have to prove it, you have to prove
it!'"

But not only does the public no longer trust that
any such proof from the media can be conclusive,
it also sees that nothing happens after it is published,
rendering the "truth" of such proof impotent,
Danner concluded. "The problem is that this
next step after revelation, which is investigation
and then punishment — or expiation and political
change — hasn't happened."

The evening concluded on this glum note, as
Schell deemed it too late to take any questions from
the audience. The five journalists were thus left
unasked whether they agreed with the spirit of this
quotation from Spinner's book — "I didn't
become a journalist to serve my country; I became
a journalist to serve the story. Dying for my country
was not as noble as dying for the truth" — or
the follow-up question:

Is it worth risking your life for a truth your countrymen
choose not to believe?

The forum
was part of the Herb Caen/San Francisco Chronicle
lecture series, presented by UC Berkeley's
Graduate School of Journalism, The San Francisco
Chronicle and The World Affairs Council.